Against denial. Against fascism. Against climate nonsense, racism, misogyny, religious bigotry, and anti-intellectualism.

Wednesday, August 29, 2012

Curry's Review

Climate Etc.'s "Week in Review" function is getting more and more erratic, ignoring big stories, trumpeting horribly unprofessional and ill-thought-out editorials, and in general looking more and more like an archaeological record of the self-reinforcing power of cognitive dissonance.

I am trying to figure out what Mann is trying to accomplish with these lawsuits. I guess he is hoping to intimidate people into not saying negative things about him?

The lack of common sense -- and lack of empathy -- expressed here is startling. Evidently tribal feelings in Dr. Curry have reached a point where she can't comprehend why a person would fight back against slander and defamation.

It seems likely, after all, that what we are witnessing in the furor
over climate change is a rerun of the wildly off-base population
explosion announced in the 1960s, or the brief romance with a threatened
ice age in the next decade, or the treatment of pregnancy as a disease,
or the pressing need for safe sex, or the horrors of growing up in a
world in which not everyone respects and affirms our every choice. . . . the actions taken at best waste time, energy and resources and at worst
either make the problem worse or create new problems in their wake.

Depending on which data set you look at, the Arctic sea ice extent is approaching or has surpassed the record minimum extent (for the period since 1979) in 2007. There are even predictions of an ice free Arctic Ocean by the end of Sept. I’ll do a post later in Sept on “what is going on and what does all this mean.” But in the mean time, here is highly confident prediction: the Arctic Ocean will NOT be ice free by the end of Sept. In fact, nearly all of thin and loosely consolidated ice has already melted (helped along by the big cyclonic storm in early Aug). The remaining ice is consolidated near Greenland and the Canadian archipelago, and is at high latitudes where the autumnal cooling is well underway. So I would suspect that there will be an earlier than usual sea ice minimum this year, with the minimum not getting much lower.

Wow, desperate much? Where are the predictions of an ice-free Arctic Ocean this year to be found? In this one paragraph we have:

1. A straw man fallacy, trying to refocus our attention on the ridiculous idea that the ice will vanish this year, a position I can find no one endorsing.
2. A desperate stab at reassuring her readership that although the ice numbers are presently in free-fall, no doubt everything will be back to normal.

It's shocking (to me at least) that promising "an earlier than usual sea ice minimum this year" is not really substantially different than Goddard's supposed "early recovery" of the sea ice. And when a full professor is starting to echo Steve Goddard, it's time to pour the whiskey and vodka down the drain and take a serious hard look at yourself.

Actually there have been some predictions of an ice-free period this year, although of course mainly by amateurs. I think I've only seen one from someone with any qualifications whatsoever (Paul Beckwith, a geography grad student with AFAICT no physics behind his view).

Of more interest is Peter Wadhams saying that based on Maslowski's work as early as 2015 is likely, but reacting to that would require staking out a real position, which Judy doesn't like doing.

Also, just to note that while the high-latitude freezing effect she mentions is real and based on past behavior could be expected to be dominant if the pack was already mostly consolidated as she says, things are looking rather loose on the Laptev side (note the near-open areas) and in the archipelago area (where the heavy ice concentration that was pushed there during the storm is looking thinner every day). 2007 e.g. had a much more tight appearance on the same melt day.